I'm making my own high-end router. From scratch.

when I showed this prototype of my custom router on homelab subreddit earlier this year people went nuts and I mean that in the best possible way result of that reaction well it appears it'll become a product you'll actually be able to buy not just yet but we'll get there [Music] together when I started this channel I knew I had to do a ton of homework not just on technical aspects such as microphones lights and cameras but also about topics I'd like to discuss with my audience so naturally I had to ask myself what am I good at well I'm good at making things case in point this is my keyboard which I designed from the ground up the case which is fully aluminum the anodization feet gaskets screws and yes even the PCB though I don't have ultium designer or kyat PCB designing tool experience I I have a friend that's expert in those areas so he helped me out and when I was done with the design I had to find manufacturers or companies that would actually manufacture all the components in a reasonable amount of time why am I saying that well because most manufacturing companies take orders in thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of whatever they're producing and then there was me asking if they could make me 50 ft for example not all of them said yes but eventually I found the ones that did and even then well I had to wait sometimes even months in order for them to find an empty slot which they'd fill my tiny order to fill with when I revealed it on Reddit I knew I could deliver on my promise of turning it into an actual router but something didn't add up you see CNC Machining is usually very expensive which is why most electronic equipment is plastic but I absolutely love aluminium enclosures for my gear so I really really really wanted to have an aluminium router but that decision highlighted a couple of problems that needed to be solved if I was to choose this path first the case itself it currently measures 21x 21x 4.5 CM add about 1 cm on each axis and you get dimensions of the raw aluminium block that you CNC mill from we're looking at roughly 2.6 2.7 L this is relevant because for the most part electronic enclosures are usually made of aluminium with designation 6061 or similar with density of around 2.7 G per cubic cm that's a 7 kg block of aluminium which currently costs around €7 per kilog that's almost 50 for the raw material before we even started doing anything with it see the problem if not think about the fact you can buy finished off the shelf routers that cost less than that granted they aren't anything special there I say they're mostly crap but still you get the point now at roughly €120 worth of Machining time another €80 for anodization to make it blue or any other color for that matter and we're looking at more than €250 just for the case alone yeah and the problems don't stop there you see if we put a gigabit capable motherboard inside it starts to make even less sense why because those can be had for anywhere between 100 or €200 and I'm not talking some cheap offbrand ones I'm talking about Asus ASRock MSI and the likes you see the problem now if not let me say it out loud it makes no Financial sense that the case itself is more expensive than the PCB inside that unfortunately meant I had to go back to the drawing board or fortunately as I'm about to show you the first objective fix the price ratio between the case and the PCB by a making the motherboard well more expensive and B making the case cheaper let's focus on the motherboard first how does one make a certain thing more expensive well you add features I started to look at motherboards with 10 GB connectivity because that's what I personally look at them as I believe that's the future of home networks this means I solved the problem of the pricing ratio between the two right well yes and no 10 GB router or server optimized motherboards cost anywhere from 600 to8 even ,000 so if I wanted to sell them as part of my router I would need to put some margin on that now combine it with the price of the case and you come to a price you know nobody in their right mind would pay for this product especially from someone who has yet to prove their ability to make a highquality networking device back to the drawing board again and this is where I turned my attention back to the case and one day my friend who's also a CNC machinist that made both this case and my keyboard asked what turned out to be the most important question in this journey so far can you make it smaller this question made me spend days looking into what kind of motherboard formats exist Beyond miniitx and surprisingly for industrial purposes there's quite a few I won't go into any of them but I will leave the link in the description so you can check them out for yourself the one that kind of caught my attention the most was 3.5 in SBC form factor which measures roughly 146 by 102 mm and that was kind of an aha moment for me if my router had one of those motherboards and supported 10 gig connectivity the ratio between the two most expensive Parts would be perfect actually let's do the math again this case requires approximately 2.7 L of aluminum at €50 but with the smaller 3.5 in motherboard we're looking at around 17x 15x 5 cm which brings us just over 1.3 l that is half of the volume of the original case and half the price of the raw material we're not as lucky with the Machining price because well there are fixed costs attached to that kind of work but still we can most likely get it at least down to around 70 to 80 from the initial 120 and don't forget to add to that the lower price of anodization and we're looking at around €150 for the case rather than 250 now that that is a very significant difference regardless of how you look at it main problem solved right well no as it currently stands there are no highquality 3.5 in motherboards with t gig connectivity and an arm processor that would support running an open source solution like open sense or Vos which gets us to the most important announcement of this video I will be making my own 3.5 in motherboard with an arm processor and 10 GB connectivity and I'll transparently do document every step of this journey here with you so if you're planning a new product or even have done it already go ahead and subscribe I'll probably mess a lot of things up and even if I completely fail I'll document that too and since I haven't reported anything on this project since May or June I believe a lot has actually happened between then and now so let me bring you up to speed the first and I think the most important thing was me meeting the director of a hardware incubator called catapult with a K it's a one-of A- kind incubator because they offer people like me cheap or even free access to some very Advanced Machinery we normally couldn't afford at this stage of development CNC milling check laser cutting check 3D printing check PCB manufacturing pick and place certification check check check the last one the certification is especially important you have probably seen the C sign on all of your electronic devices even the back back of your iPhone has one it stands for consumer electronics and in a nutshell it means that the device meets the safety health and environmental protection requirements and it's not the certificate itself that is expensive it's all the testing that has to be performed in order to receive it and just so you have a ballpark feeling consumer electronics certification for devices without Wireless functionalities costs tens of thousands of Euros add Wi-Fi to that or Bluetooth and it's measured in high hundreds of thousands of Euros ouch to alleviate that pain catapult has their own testing facilities that their members can either use completely free or for some very reasonable fee and most often there's no or very little waiting time you need to measure something you go there and do it you need something 3D printed send the design get in the car and it will most likely be done before you even get there it's like using cheat codes same as clicking that like button is like using cheat codes for YouTube so do your boy a solid and click it now no no don't worry I'll wait thank you a couple of months ago this incubator had one of their pitch days and the director his name is Yer said I should totally apply so I applied prepared my slides and presented the idea to about 50 people in the room and a week after I received an email saying I was accepted go be the celebration was shortlived and rightfully so as that's when the real work began first order of business make a business plan because every business idea needs one not because A business plan is accurate in fact they very rarely survive the first contact with the market but because writing one forces you to look at all aspects of the product you're about to build what the market size looks like what your potential buyers are uh what your unfair Advantage is who your competition is and what they're doing what the main risks are and so on and so forth the most important part of the business plan well well at least if you intend to fundra for your project which I totally do is the financial plan which I won't go into details right now because it warrants its own video for now let's just say that in a financial plan you have to look at how you're going to make money and how you're going to spend it the latter is often much higher at the early stages of Any Given product's lifetime but you make up for it for the difference in time and hopefully significantly surpass it at some point in the future Financial plans look at things such as salaries office rents expenses Hardware development software development production certification even lawyers and accountants and on the income side you look at how many units in my case routers you have to sell in order to well make a profit now let me be very clear all these numbers are guesswork but that doesn't mean they're wrong either especially because you're most likely making a product that's solving a problem in the domain you already know a lot about for example how big say salaries are or how much you already pay for an accountant or a lawyer but just in case in order to make it even more accurate you should get yourself a mentor or an adviser someone from the industry preferably someone who's done something similar before if nothing else to play The Devil's Advocate to your optimism and keep you grounded or to pick you up when you're feeling demotivated it happens to all of us now interestingly enough my mentor was introduced to me by the director of catapult even before I was a member because and get this he had already developed a router in his previous job the mentor not the director one he received a red dot award for we immediately connected because obviously we share the same passion for networking gear unfortunately I can't disclose who it is yet but I will try and get him to this Channel at least to say hi he's watching this video so he's getting the message I have already written mine and I will walk you through it in one of the upcoming videos but as a teaser I'll let you in on a little secret by far the most important numbers in my financial plan and I imagine in plenty others are the cost of production so how much it cost to make a single unit or a thousand of them there's a difference margins which is the difference between how much a unit costs to produce and what we sell it for and finally the number of units sold so what we're going to do in the next video in this series is focus on the first of those numbers cost of production we'll draw a Blog diagram assemble a bill of materials and calculate the margins which will then serve as the framework for most of the future decisions and I will also explain why so make sure you're subscribe because I'd like you all to be my devil's Advocates or pick me up when I'll need it if you've been watching this video up to this point I have a small request can you please let me know if you like this kind of content would you like more of it or less also is there something in particular you'd like to learn go ahead and write it all down in the comments I read each and every one of them not that there's that many of them but still have a good [Music] one

Channel: Tomaž Zaman

Views: 140,267

Keywords: networking, router, cnc

Id: UFKhprphIAA

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2023